Maternal personality and infants’ neural and visual responsivity to facial expressions of emotion

Haan, Michelle de; Belsky, Jay; Reid, Vincent M.; Volein, Ágnes; Johnson, Mark H.

doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.00320.x

Cited by 178 publications

(230 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…Only in the right hemisphere and only for original stimuli did the Nc differ between gaze directions [F(1,21) = 4.4, P = 0.048, η 2 = 0.17]; direct gaze elicited greater Nc than averted gaze [t(21) = −2.14, P = 0.044, r = 0.42, direct −8.27 ± 2.95 μV, averted −0.25 ± 3.65 μV]. Note that although this effect was only significant in the right hemisphere, which is sometimes observed in studies of face processing (50,51), the ERPs showed a similar modulation in the left hemisphere and the overall topography of the effect was similar to experiment 1 ( Fig. 4; see Fig.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Gaze Processingmentioning

confidence: 74%

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human eyes serve two key functions in face-to-face social interactions: they provide cues about a person's emotional state and attentional focus (gaze direction). Both functions critically rely on the morphologically unique human sclera and have been shown to operate even in the absence of conscious awareness in adults. However, it is not known whether the ability to respond to social cues from scleral information without conscious awareness exists early in human ontogeny and can therefore be considered a foundational feature of human social functioning. In the current study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to show that 7-mo-old infants discriminate between fearful and nonfearful eyes (experiment 1) and between direct and averted gaze (experiment 2), even when presented below the perceptual threshold. These effects were specific to the human sclera and not seen in response to polarityinverted eyes. Our results suggest that early in ontogeny the human brain detects social cues from scleral information even in the absence of conscious awareness. The current findings support the view that the human eye with its prominent sclera serves critical communicative functions during human social interactions.infancy | social perception | human eye | subliminal processing | emotion processing

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Section: Experiments 2: Gaze Processingmentioning

confidence: 74%

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Jessen

Großmann

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Converging evidence comes from infants' ERPs. Nelson andde Haan (1996) andde Haan et al (2004) found that the Nc in 7-month-old infants' ERPs was greater in amplitude to fearful than to happy faces. Recall from section 1a that the Nc is thought to reflect infants' allocation of attention.…”

Section: A the Negativity Bias In Attention To Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

937

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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“…It is assumed that the ability to recognize facial emotions is in part due to a biological readiness, but environmental factors are of importance as well (de Haan et al, 2004;Herba and Phillips, 2004). However, little is known about the influence of psychiatric disorders during childhood or adolescence on the development of this function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuronal Correlates of Facial Emotion Discrimination in Early Onset Schizophrenia

Seiferth

Pauly

Kellermann

et al. 2008

Neuropsychopharmacol

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Emotion discrimination deficits represent a well-established finding in schizophrenia. Although imaging studies addressed the cerebral dysfunctions underlying emotion perception in adult patients, the question of trait vs state characteristics is still unresolved. The investigation of juvenile patients offers the advantage of studying schizophrenia at an age where influences of illness course and long-term medication are minimized. This may enable a more detailed characterization of emotion discrimination impairments and their cerebral correlates with respect to their appearance and exact nature. A total of 12 juvenile patients with early onset schizophrenia and matched healthy juveniles participated in this study. fMRI data were acquired during an emotion discrimination task consisting of standardized photographs of faces displaying happy, sad, angry, fearful, or neutral facial expression. Similar to findings in adult patients, juvenile patients exhibited reduced performance specificity whereas sensitivity was unaffected. Independent of the valence, their processing of emotional faces was associated with hypoactivations in both fusiform gyri and in the left inferior occipital gyrus. In addition, hyperactivations in patients were found in the right cuneus common to happy, angry, and fearful faces. Further, most distinct changes were present in juvenile patients when processing sad faces. These results point to a dysfunction in cerebral circuits relevant for emotion processing already prominent in adolescent schizophrenia patients. Regions affected by a decrease in activation are related to visual and face processing, similar to deficits reported in adult patients. These changes are accompanied by hyperactivations in areas related to emotion regulation and attribution, possibly reflecting compensatory mechanisms.

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Maternal personality and infants’ neural and visual responsivity to facial expressions of emotion

Abstract: To the extent that these variations in maternal disposition reflect variations in their expression of positive facial expressions, these results suggest that the emotional environment experienced by infants contributes to the development of their responses to facial expressions.

Cited by 178 publications

References 72 publications

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Neuronal Correlates of Facial Emotion Discrimination in Early Onset Schizophrenia

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